James Holderness wrote: > Obviously that is ridiculous. Yes, we can't tell the > difference, but why should we care? Why does a client > *need* to be able to distinguish between links to > discussions and links to anything else? Human readers > obviously care where something is linking, but that's > why we have the title attribute.
If you have a feedreader that is capable of discovering comments for a given entry and it can display those comments (threaded) alongside the entry, then it seems reasonable to take that a step further and provide a means for the feedreader to add a new reply. It needs to be able to enable/disable its "reply" interface for each entry based on whether or not it can find a supported means of replying. Presumably that is what atom:link/@rel='discuss' is supposed to do. Right now, you can look for a rel='replies' link, retrieve the replies feed, and search for an app:collection element that indicates the feed is an AtomPub collection feed. If so, then you could enable the reply feature and try submitting the reply via an AtomPub POST. Maybe something similar can be done with rel='replies' with XMPP? I don't know; I've never done anything with XMPP. Even if that is the case, the extra requests necessary for this kind of discovery might be unacceptable; a "reply" button should be enabled/disabled instantaneously when the entry is selected. For that reason, some indication within the entry of the possibility of replying is probably necessary. I guess that is what rel="discuss" is supposed to be for. If so, I think it should be mixed in with a specification of the entire discussion mechanism: how discussions are discovered, how exactly to reply, how to authenticate, how to deal with CAPTCHAs, etc. > As a feed publisher, if I wanted to link to an IRC channel, > news forum or mailing list where people were actively > discussing a post, I would want the readers of my feed to > *see* that link and be able to click on it and join the > discussion. Right now I can get that functionality in a > number of feed readers using a "related" link. If I were > to change my link to use "discuss", it would suddenly > become invisible. My feed would become significantly > less functional. You can have the same link provided using multiple relations. A feed reader that doesn't refuses to show a link just because the link has a relation it doesn't understand sounds broken to me. If the feed reader is going to expose related links, it would be better off exposing all the links except the ones that it knows are not useful to the end-user. A lot of feed readers (probably the vast majority) don't expose "related" links. In fact, I've tried a few feed readers and I've never used one that exposed the "related" links in any usable way to me. You have to put them in the atom:content as (X)HTML links if you want them to be accessible to people. Regards, Brian
